Archive for the ‘Nabokov’ Category

I’ve been rereading Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Defense, about Luzhin, a socially maladroit grandmaster who comes to see the entire world as one big chess game. The book is a fun read, and it was necessary for me to review it because I discuss Luzhin’s decent into madness in my own, forthcoming book about chess obsession, King’s Gambit: A Father, a Son, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game.

English was not Nabokov’s first language—he collaborated with a translator on The Defense—but the book is a lexicographic wet dream. His exuberant prose is bursting with simple and sesquipedalian words, which stumped me (and I used to oversee a dictionary company!).

Opening the book at random, to pages 178 and 179, I find half a dozen unfamiliar words on that spread alone—a testament to his erudition (and the fact that my religious upbringing was obviously sub-par):

epigaster

censer

thurible

matins

censer

paschal

Five points for guessing which word means “the posterior part of the embryonic intestine from which the colon develops.” Ten points for unobtrusively slipping the word into a conversation!